Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Provincial NDPocalypse in Ontario!!! Ahhhhh!!

Nanos' quarterly tracking of voting intentions in the province of Ontario have actually come out with very little movement among the parties, minus mutual drops between the Whodat Progressive Conservatives to 41% (down from 44%), and the Horwath Dippers to 19% (up from 16%). The governing Ontario Liberals, led by Premier Dalton McGuinty, have dropped a point to 34%, and the Greens under some person went up to 5%.

19% for the NDP in a poll isn't exactly out of the world, of course; during 2010, several pollsters had them above 20%. But it is slightly remarkable for Nanos, who tends to penalize the NDP in favour of the other two main parties. Whether this pans out into something remains to be seen, but you can never rule anything out, especially with the results we saw on the federal level.

Good news, however, is that even though the NDP are up, McGuinty is retaining some of his shine as Premier. 25.3% of respondents thought he would make the best Premier, compared to 30.8% for Hudak and 15.7% for Horwath. This is an increase for every single major party leader, though a major increase for Horwath of 6%.

This represents a very different situation that what you had on the federal level, with an overwhelmingly popular NDP leader and a very weak Liberal leader. Say what you will about McGuinty, but he's been a lot more popular than Ignatieff.

However, the fact that all four leaders are running behind their parties is not necessarily the best sign ever.